“We’ve probably lost $1bn dollars… but what’s the price of freedom?”
Image credit: Epic Games
Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has said he has “no regrets” over his company’s decision to break Apple and Google’s terms of service back in August 2020 – something that saw the hugely-popular Fortnite booted off both iPhone and Android storefronts.
The carefully choreographed stunt sparked four years of legal wrangling over Apple and Google’s app store policies – and has ultimately led to Epic Games launching its own mobile store today on Android worldwide and on iPhone in mainland Europe, thanks to policy changes demanded of Apple by the EU.
“We’ve probably lost a billion dollars not having Fortnite on iOS the past four years,” Sweeney said, in a briefing to press ahead of the Epic Games Store on mobile going live. “But what’s the price of freedom?”
Today, Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe and a new Fall Guys mobile version (cross-compatible with the existing PC and console editions) will be the first games available in the Epic Game Store on smartphones. Other, non-Epic Games titles will then become available later this year.
“We’ve set a goal of 100m new installs across Android and iOS before the end of the year,” explained Steve Allison, Epic Game Store’s VP, General Manager. “We think we could do that in a world where everything was a level playing field, and we’re still trying to drive at that number. The only thing standing in our way is the friction Apple and Google are putting in front of us – and it’s pretty significant.”
Epic Games is still unhappy about a variety of things – including a fiddly process to install its alternative storefront on iPhone that it says requires 15 steps. This is in comparison to the handful of taps necessary to download a game from the in-built App Store.
First, you’ll need to head to Epic Games’ website (again, this is if you’re on Android, or on an iOS device in the EU – apologies, UK readers) and hit the install Epic Games Store button. On iPhone, this will bring up the first of several “scare screens” – ominous-looking warnings that tell you the process requires you to go change your device settings. It’s not a difficult process, but it’s fair to say Apple could make it more straightforward – and the warnings seem deliberately worded to dissuade casual users from continuing.
Epic Games’ hope, it seems, is that Fortnite (and also Rocket League and Fall Guys) are big enough draws that people push through the above 15 steps to get playing the company’s games again on their phones. And, once again, there’s more careful choreography at play – today also being the big launch of Fortnite’s new Marvel-infused season.
“We’re going to invest in getting hundreds of millions of players through the gate,” Allison continued, “and we’re working super hard across the board to get third-party developers to join us”.
But, on iPhone especially, Epic Games faces an uphill battle still. Sweeney has previously railed against Apple’s “junk fees on downloads and new Apple taxes” that are currently set to penalise any developers who want to launch an app on the Epic Games Store for mobile as well as on the App Store. (Memorably, Sweeney dubbed these fees as “hot garbage”.)
“Of the top 250 developers we’ve been targeting to bring their apps to the Epic Game Store, everybody’s excited about coming to our store on Android because there’s no imposition of ‘junk fees’ just for the purpose of going to a competing store,” Sweeney told press this week. “Zero of them have expressed a willingness to come to the Epic Game Store on iOS – it’s just uneconomical.
“Apple has set these fees in order to make it vastly more expensive, not just to do business on the Epic Game Store, but if you come to the Epic Game Store you’re penalised on the iOS App Store. They make their store terms worse for the privilege of trying to compete with them. Obviously it makes no competitive sense, its anti-competitive.”
Exactly how much further Apple will change its policies remains to be seen, but the EU continues to take a close interest in how the mobile maker is implementing the changes it has been required to make as a result of the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Today’s launch gives Epic Games a foot in the door, for now, an the company says it is hopeful of further markets opening up next year, including the UK and Japan.
In the meantime, Apple has behaved “dishonestly and maliciously”, Sweeney continued. “If you give Apple the arbitary power to block competitors’ access to the platform, of course they can block whoever they want. That power needs to be taken away from them.”
Today also sees Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe and Fall Guys also become available on the first of several other, smaller third-party mobile stores (though no longer major player Samsung), as Epic Games seeks to demonstrate it is fighting for wider change, rather than just its own slice of the app store market.
So, you can also now nab the above three games from indie app store Altstore, an enterprise co-founded by Riley Testut, creator of the Delta emulator, which Apple initially blocked. Other apps from Altstore include a mobile Torrent app.
“I’ve no regrets, Apple had to be challenged,” Sweeney concluded, reflecting on the past four years. “Before we directly challenged Apple and pointed out to the world exactly what their practices were, a lot of people just read Apple’s marketing and thought the App Store was a normal store like any other. They didn’t realise that it was, in effect, banning any other competition. And because all app developers passed on their 30 percent fees to their customers, no one understood the App Store inflated prices for anything users come into contact with.
“The way we challenged Apple and Google – we introduced Epic Direct Payment and passed on 20 percent savings to all our customers – immediately turned the conversation to these ‘junk fees’ increasing the cost of software and the monopoly nature of its App Store. By Apple blocking Fortnite from a billion devices they proved to the world they do have a monopoly to access to software for a billion users. Similarly by Google blocking Fortnite they established they did have a monopoly.
“When you look at everything that’s happened since, you can trace a lot of it back – not only to regulators, but also consumers coming to a really clear realisation of the insidious nature of what [Apple/Google] call ‘walled gardens’ but we should just simply call monopolies in the fields of software distribution and payment processing, and how they’ve really corrupted the whole digital ecosystem compared to the days of really open platforms, such as Windows and the open web.”
Epic Games isn’t the only company launching a new mobile storefront. While delayed beyond its expected launch date, Microsoft is still working on its own store for smartphones – and it will be interesting to see if Fortnite will end up on there. “The standard for us is – great terms for all developers,” Allison said, when asked. “We don’t know their terms yet.”
“If [the terms] are great, we’ll come,” concluded Sweeney. “If they’re not great, we won’t come.”
